August 12, 2010: Use Your Words!

As a mom of a 4 year old and a 2 1/2 year old who wants to help her children create healthy habits for conflict resolution, habits that do not involve pinching, pushing, biting or hitting, I am a person who repeats more times than I can count per day, “Remember to use your words.” Soon, I will take on the challenges of helping them to choose which words, to master volume control and to make eye contact, but for now, we celebrate with enthusiasm those moments when one of them resisted the urge to launch out towards the other and instead expressed themselves with words. 

Though your children are much farther along in their understanding and use of a variety of communication strategies than mine are, they are still very much learning. It is crucial to keep in mind that they are learning, because sometimes children will understand and communicate perfectly well, and other times their perceptions and understandings will have been impacted by an element of communication, such as humor, for example, that will lead to a miscommunication and potentially a conflict or hurt feelings. So much of what your children experience and do at school falls into the huge area of communication, and though you will receive feedback about their individual progress in the academic content area of Literacy (listening, speaking, reading and writing), communication clearly pervades and impacts every single aspect of their learning and social interactions. 

In school, we work hard to avoid miscommunications by modeling specific, clear, direct language. We try to avoid humor or sarcasm with children and to break-up instructions into shorter, more manageable units. We do these things and many more to help create successful communication between students and teachers. Despite our efforts, miscommunication, misunderstandings, and simply missed communication happens, and this is why we work very hard as a school to communicate regularly and effectively with parents. We also incorporate forums to improve communication among students, such as Class Meetings.

As a school, we try to communicate with parents and students through a variety of means to achieve the most open communication possible.

We all must communicate with each other and help all of our students grow in their communication abilities. We acknowledge that there will be times when we misunderstand and others when we are all right on target, which we hope is the more frequent situation! Using our words, asking questions when we are not certain, clarifying, listening, and reading (thank you for reading!): communicating as a team WILL make a difference in your child’s school experience.